Socialist Group Wants Campus Police Disarmed

There’s a bizarre move at work in this country, especially on college campuses. It seems that students don’t like the idea of campus police being armed. In fact, they’re actively working to have officers disarmed.

A radical student activist group at Stony Brook University, New York is demanding that the school disarm its campus police to avoid “unnecessary tension” between cops and minorities.

A four-page manifesto released last week by the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) at Stony Brook argues that the president of the university, Samuel Stanley, has the capacity “to revoke firearms from the possession of university police,” adding that the possession of firearms “creates unnecessary tension between officers and the university community, especially between minorities and police.”

“It has been empirically demonstrated that university police are ineffective in the use of firearms, regardless of the quality of training,” the document continues. “Furthermore, the militarization of university police promotes confrontation through violence, as opposed to social engagement, as the solution to mass shootings in America.”

Some students, including the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, endorsed the call to disarm the police during a March 28 demonstration against gun violence organized by the YDSA, according to The Statesman.

“America has a huge gun problem, and any gun control measures must include the demilitarization and disarming of law enforcement agencies,” the chapter’s founder, Thomas Sheroff, told the Statesman. “The Young Democratic Socialists of Stony Brook University call upon President Stanley to truly take the lead in transforming and leading the way the correct future of gun control and disarm the Stony Brook UPD.”

The College Democrats chapter at Stony Brook did not back up the calls for disarming the police. Just the socialists. Credit to the Democrats for once.

Shocking, right?

It’s kind of funny since socialists are one of the reasons I even own guns.

Anyway, this is one of the dumber ideas out there. Schools such as colleges are already vulnerable to active shooters. There’s a reason they’re the preferred hunting grounds for these kinds of predators; they’re generally gun free zones so civilians can’t be armed.

The closest responders for such an attack are the campus police.

If you disarm them, then you simply make the college a more attractive target. Campus police couldn’t respond even if they wanted to. After all, the students have basically taken away all their guns. All they could do is cordon off the area and keep people from going in. Kind of. It’s not like they can do much except yell at people.

Luckily for all, active shooters are still fairly rare. There are far more common crimes that occur on college campuses…but many of them require an armed response.

If you take away their firearms, you’re going to lose the best officers in that department. That’s just how it shakes out. No officer wants to be defenseless in the face of unknown threats. If you disarm them, they leave. It’s just that simple.

What you end up with are a group of misfits that no other department would hire. That is who will be investigating campus rape accusations or reports of property theft.

But anti-gun hysteria is rarely rational enough to recognize that fact.